The National Center for Science Education published a terrific tour of creationist Ken Ham’s new Noah’s Ark theme park by Dan Phelps, the president of the Kentucky Paleontology Society. The entire piece is well worth a read, but I was especially interested in the Ark Encounter’s presentation of antediluvian life, the period of the Nephilim from Genesis 6 that so interests both creationists and fringe historians of every stripe. After reading Phelps’s description, I was genuinely surprised to see that Ham has absorbed so much fringe history into his supposedly “scientific” approach to Biblical literalism.

The first and most important thing to note before beginning is that Genesis is largely silent on the world before the Flood. It offers only a few hints about what the ancient Jews imagined the world was like in the earliest ages. We know, for example, that there were cities because Genesis 4:17 describes the fratricidal Cain as building the first city, Enoch. From the description of Cain’s other descendants, we are to infer that wicked humans not only lived in cities by had music (4:21) and metalworking (4:22), and that somehow this was a bad thing since the godly line of Seth in Genesis 5 does not engage with them. In Genesis 6 we learn that the “Sons of God” had sex with human women and bore Nephilim giants to them, and God declares all humanity to be corrupt and wicked. And that is the extent of the antediluvian world as given in Genesis.

Obviously, such a paltry description practically begged the ancients to try filling in the gaps. Apocalyptic Jewish and Christian literature described fallen angels corrupting human women and tempting them with makeup lessons, medicinal plants, and horoscopes (1 Enoch 7:1, 8:1, 8:3). They developed myths about cannibal giants (Jubilees 5:2) and a world undone primarily by vain and horny women (Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, Reuben 5; Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women 1.2, etc.) and by music (Book of the Cave of Treasures, etc.). They even filled in the biography of Noah with fanciful details. The Genesis Apocryphon gives Noah a supernatural look and causes his father to worry that he is a son of the Fallen Angels. In one version, Noah lives on a mountain all alone until he decides at the age of 500 to marry have kids (Agapius of Hierapolis, Kitab al-'Unwan). Another version makes him an evangelist preaching godliness to the Nephilim (Flavius Josephus, Antiquities 1.74) and to people in general, though to no avail, as ancient and medieval Jewish sources attest.

This last version is the biography of Noah adapted into Islamic lore. In the Qur’an, Noah preaches to the sinful antediluvians. In stories outside of the Qur’an, Noah has a convoluted history in which his building of the Ark is intertwined with the parallel construction of the Pyramids of Egypt as safeguards against the Flood that the sages of Babylon, Egypt, and Arabia prophesied. The Akhbar al-zaman and Murtada ibn al-’Afif preserve versions of Noah’s adventures with the high priest of Egypt and the king of Babylon.

The point is that there is a ready-made mythology of the antediluvian world that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis could have drawn upon, one which is hallowed by time, if not by facts. Instead, Phelps reports that Ham’s group went down the fringe history rabbit hole. First, let’s start with the more or less “normal” stuff, as Phelps describes it:

Since the Bible only has a limited description of Noah and his family, AiG “research” is required to fill in the missing details. These details are provided by the steaming shovelful. One sign under “Artistic License” states, “This exhibit provides a plausible backstory based on clues from Scripture to explain how the Lord may have prepared His faithful servant to fulfill such an important mission.” In this artistic version of Noah’s story, we learn that he was raised a farmer; but, after seeing small ships, he longed for adventure. He became an apprentice shipbuilder, learned all the appropriate skills, and married the daughter of his employer. If anyone else invented embellished stories about anything in the Bible, AiG would have a conniption.

How strange is it that Ark Encounter chooses to ignore the Jewish, early Christian, and Islamic accounts of Noah to make up stories of their own? As Phelps notes, Answers in Genesis threw a fit that the 2014 movie Noah featured extra-Biblical references to the Watchers, and yet they are happy to make up their own details as needed. Perhaps it is simply politically inconvenient for political conservatives such as Ham to suggest that Jews and Muslims have a share of the truth that he does not.

Ark Encounter offers a strange antediluvian history. According to them, the Earth was filled with violent giants who engaged in great wars with sinful regular humans. This, as should be obvious, is not in Genesis but echoes the apocryphal books of Enoch and Jubilees. But then Ark Encounter tells visitors that the people before the Flood engaged in a snake cult, worshiping a serpent. The accompanying illustrations feature cultists drawn from Mycenaean and Minoan imagery and Mexican-style pyramids, but the claim itself is quite explicitly extra-biblical. It comes, more or less, from John Bathurst Deane’s Worship of the Serpent from the 1830s, in which the clergyman argued that all pagan religions were a corruption of Genesis, and that evil pagans mistook the Serpent in the Garden for a wisdom god. The claim is best known from Rosicrucian Freemason Hargrave Jennings’s version of it in his book Ophiolatreia, a book that helped shape Theosophical ideas about a Brotherhood of the Snake and eventually fringe history views on Reptilians. The Brotherhood of the Snake became popular among ancient astronaut theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. Ark Encounter seems to be taking the Theosophical snake-worshiping cult of antediluvian Lemuria and Atlantis and ascribing it to the antediluvians of Genesis. This is certainly an odd thing for a creationist to do!

Dan Phelps's photograph of the Ark Encounter's antediluvian globe.

But here is the weirdest thing: In a mock-up of Noah’s “library” of antediluvian artifacts (!) is a globe depicting the Earth as it would have appeared in 2348 BCE, according to catastrophist creationist “Flood geology.” Does Ark Encounter expect us to believe that the Nephilim mapped the world before the Flood? That claim doesn’t come from the Bible but from Charles Hapgood’s catastrophist classic Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings, which argues that Ice Age humans had mapped the world in astonishing detail before a pole shift destroyed their civilization. Graham Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods adopted this catastrophist line to explain the Flood (since swapped out for a comet, which was Edmund Halley’s Flood explanation). This seemingly insignificant detail in Ark Encounter’s exhibit suggests that the creators of the place are less biblical than they imagine, and much more heavily influenced by secular fringe history than they will ever admit

A while ago I read an online promotional piece (which I can't locate now) for the Ark which described the dozens of "crews" working on the project and, as I recall, the fifteen truckloads of lumber being delivered to the site daily. I couldn't help wondering where Noah had ordered his lumber, all precut and ready for assembly. The most amusing part of the article was a picture of an Amish "craftsman" using a battery-powered screwdriver to fasten together two timbers with a large steel lag-bolt. That must have been part of the antediluvian technology that was lost in the flood.

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 11:55:07 pm

The Ark is the skull.
The drug producing mind expansion.
All roads lead back to that conclusion.
Without drugs, there would be no religion.
Without religion, there would be no Bible.
No Bible, no myth of Noah's Ark that was modelled on the myth of Utu-napishtim.

It's a given that the original Utu-napishtim myth was about drugs and mind-expansion.

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 11:58:01 pm

It's much too terrible to think that even the sweet and beautiful Judeo-Christian religion was founded on the psychedelic drug experience. But all religions and ancient societies revolved around drugs. The earliest Christians during the first century took drugs which was the original non-humanoid Jesus Christ.

Gunn

10/25/2016 11:49:11 am

Great article...well, except for conflating Biblical and non-Biblical information. But, it seems to have been done artfully, and readers can get a fairly good idea of how this conflating works, instead of just being left confused.

This "antediluvian globe" reminds me of the ballista-like round boulder as described in one of the Norse Sagas, which was apparently used by Native Americans on America's east coast during medieval times to smash into men, paddles and canoes/boats. An animal skin was wrapped around the boulder and tightly attached to a long pole, making it look a bit like a globe on a pole. Such a rock might appear as a sort of innocently decorated globe on a pole...until it came crashing down!

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Kal

10/25/2016 01:52:48 pm

An Amish person using battery operated technology to screw in a bolt? Surely not.

The ancients thought the world was much smaller than it actually is, because to them the world was just about north Africa and lower Europe.

Why does that globe look like the Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico? Ha.

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DaveR

10/25/2016 02:00:19 pm

Because they're making their imagined artifacts to fit in with their perspective.

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Uncle Ron

10/25/2016 04:54:45 pm

Don't kid yourself, Kal. I've lived around the Amish all my life. They are an odd lot. They claim to eschew modern technology because they do not want to be "connected to the outside world" but they use it when it's convenient or makes them money. They have cell phones. They won't have electricity (except batteries) in their homes and businesses but they use it whenever they can, outside of those areas. I go to an Amish-run auction house. They light the room with gas and record the bids on paper tablets. Then they take the paper in to the electrically-lighted office and enter the sales into computers. They will gladly drive YOUR truck if they work for you. They used GAS LIGHTING in spray booths where they spray state-of-the-industry catalyzed-varnish finishes on furniture (it will come as no surprise that at least one burns down every year). They didn't use electricity in their barns until the State wouldn't allow them to sell milk that wasn't refrigerated. As long as the Bishop doesn't say it's forbidden they will try it. Oh, and some of them have gone to court to fight the state-mandated safety triangle that is required on slow-moving (read: horse-drawn) vehicles operated on public roads. The reason? It's "too worldly."

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#Blacklivesmatter

10/25/2016 07:07:56 pm

Go back to bashing Afrocentrism Uncle Tom. Picking on the Amish seems low, even for you.

V

10/26/2016 07:57:21 pm

I think you actually misunderstand the Amish a fair amount, sir. It's not that they're not allowed to use technology, it's that they're very, VERY big on "community," and their elders--not a Bishop--determines what they can and can't use on that basis, and whether they can use it not at all, only for work, or for work and home. Electricity is a work-only item, and so are telephones and the Internet, because they can't actually do business without those anymore. There's leeway for dealing with gentiles, as well. Oh, and things like barbecue grills? Perfectly ok, because they're designed for entertaining and building a larger community.

The gas lighting and the paper tablets in the auction house are almost certainly a gimmick, by the way, because that's what stupid gentiles EXPECT them to use.

Americanegro

10/29/2016 12:18:27 am

"There's leeway for dealing with gentiles, as well."

You don't know what a "gentile" is, do you?

Weatherwax

10/26/2016 01:04:48 am

Probably Mennonites. The dress similar to Amish but I don't believe that have the same technology issues. They travel around doing construction work. A lot of them came here to San Diego after the Cedar Fire and helped people re-build. They did good work, but sometimes didn't bother with permits.

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Americanegro

10/29/2016 12:16:11 am

"The ancients thought the world was much smaller than it actually is, because to them the world was just about north Africa and lower Europe."

I think you want the remedial class down the hall. The ancient Greeks had a pretty good estimate of the circumference of the Earth.

And uh, you might want to factor in Mesopotamia to the ancient world picture, since that's where Western civilization started. And not much later, Alexander the Great had no trouble finding Afghanistan and India. In that part of the world, you basically just have to walk.

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Tom

10/25/2016 02:05:08 pm

Many years ago I read a speculative article claiming that Moses was the original name of the "brazen serpent" god worshipped in ancient times.
Philo of Alexandria who lived at the time of the annexation of Judea thought that the "giants" were intellectual giants not physical giants.

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 02:09:38 pm

>>described fallen angels corrupting human women<<

You only have to watch Braveheart - the occupying force (the Nephilim) had the privilege of having sex with women of an occupied country.

Nothing special in Genesis 6 at all.

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Shane Sullivan

10/25/2016 02:41:16 pm

A globe, eh? So we know they're not flat-earthers, at least.

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Only Me

10/25/2016 04:33:54 pm

Phelps's review was fantastic. I still can't believe that dump received $18M in tax incentives/breaks.

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 05:54:33 pm

I know an establishment in Italy

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 05:55:37 pm

>>Biblical literalism<<

A rationalised Bible is even more useless.

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DanD

10/25/2016 06:19:14 pm

Useless you say? Much like your comments. *boring*

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Time Machine

10/25/2016 11:49:44 pm

"Mount Sinai was Mount Etna"

Nope, that's childish.
Mount Sinai was metaphor for mind-expansion for the creation of the Jewish religion.

On an interesting note, the author Hugh Lofting, wrote about the antediluvian world in one of his last books, "Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake". The story revolves around the good doctor going to the assistance of an old friend, who is also the oldest creature on earth, Mudface the giant turtle. It turns out that Mudface, when he was smaller and younger, was a passenger on Noah's ark. He relates everything he knows about life before, during and after the flood. He tells about how at least one other young couple survived, more by luck than good planning.

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dave

10/25/2016 08:12:20 pm

Enoch was a city? Now I'm picturing the book of Enoch as some sort of an antediluvian Rough Guide, which makes me giggle.

It's a different Enoch. Cain had a son named Enoch, and Seth had a descendant of the same name. The similarities between the progenies of Cain and Seth in Genesis 4 and 5 has suggested to some scholars that an older myth has been duplicated, once as "evil" and once as "good."

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E.P. Grondine

10/26/2016 01:45:28 pm

This reminds me of Jim Baker's Holyland project, but that was located closer to Disneyland and Universal at Orlando.

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Pierre Cloutier

10/26/2016 10:31:18 pm

So the flood occurred c. 2348 B.C.E.? Really!? The ancient Egyptians must have just missed it. After all they had not to long before built the Great Pyramid of Khufu and no doubt had other things on their minds. I also note that the flood seems to have missed the Akkadian dynasty in Mesopotamia. I guess Sargon the Great and his grandson Naram-Sin must have overlocked it.

But seriously a date of 2348 B.C.E. for a universal flood is just plain idiotic.

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Americanegro

10/29/2016 12:02:29 am

"In Genesis 6 we learn that the “Sons of God” had sex with human women and bore Nephilim giants to them..."

It would have been the women doing the bearing.

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